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“... as its midwives. It then continues, by way of Newton, Locke and (for some purposes) Hume, to the French Philosophes, reaching its end, if not its climax, in Kant. It is overwhelmingly a secular phenomenon, whose protagonists (at the least) attach little positive value to religion. In short it is the Enlightenment of traditional Ideengeschichte, as rendered ...”

“... finish, techniques of veneering and exotic materials found in contemporary cabinets, while the French rococo frames were the work of sculptors who also carved ornamental wall-panelling, and were sometimes created by the leading designers of the luxury furnishings with which they danced in unison. However well ...”

“... whose other barely distinguishable symptoms were marijuana, acne and the vapourisings of feckless French fumisterie. Talk of a ‘crisis’ in English studies usually misses the point. It’s more appropriate to see the English studies itself as the response to a crisis. Politics were always involved, and the pressures of industrial competition and ...”

“... Are counter-factuals, then, a seductive but hopeless strategy for the historical imagination? David Lewis argued in Counterfactuals (1973) that warranted counter-factuals not only had to obey causal logic, they had to imply a real alternative world, of which it seemed there must be an infinite number. Hawthorn along with earlier critics rejects this ...”

“... of this kind’. One expects that sort of thing from Portillo, who probably thinks Lebanon is French and something to do with the European Union and therefore to be opposed. Rifkind should know better. Probably he does. Before we left London I had the impression that, with Rifkind away in Bolivia or somewhere, our attitude was being laid down not by the ...”

“... I know the Monster, because I have lived in its lair – and my weapon is only the slingshot of David. Martí was the founder of the Cuban nation, the framer of Cuban identity if anyone was, and this doesn’t sound like identification with the United States. Goliath stepped in before David could level the ...”

“... pseudonym of Mohammed Moulessehoul, a former high-ranking Algerian military officer who writes in French under his wife’s name. Getting translated into English is a hurdle cleared by few novelists from the Arab and Muslim world; it helps if one writes against one of America’s enemies. In The Swallows of Kabul, Khadra writes against the ultimate enemy: the ...”

“... most of them were originally written in English, although he also wrote many letters in French during that time, and they form the main part of quite a different selection, Lettres d’ Amérique, published in France in 1984. Broadly speaking, they fall into the following categories: Gripping social correspondence of the ‘Thank you for your ...”

“... to traipse around Europe, playing his fiddle, enjoying the seasons and the landscapes, learning French, Italian, German, Hebrew and, at Trinity College, Dublin, making a reasonable shot at modern Irish. He had the background of a gentleman and the instincts of an aesthete: spiritualism and theosophy were more in his line than the activities of the Land ...”

“... to the category of purely inventive or observant novelists, like Balzac or Dickens (setting aside David Copperfield). Plot invention, in particular, was never his forte: Le Rouge et le Noir derived from two separate causes célèbres, La Chartreuse from an untrustworthy 16th-century account of the youthful escapades of Pope Paul III, and Lucien Leuwen was ...”

“... de-authored, copyrightless text? Barthes gives an oblique answer on the back page of S/Z’s French edition, where it is noted that medieval writing was quadripartite. There was the scriptor who copied, the compilator who interpolated commonplaces, the commentator who wove in interpretation and the auctor who ventured some new ideas. If the future holds ...”

“... in the Rain’ (flu-defying splashes in puddles), ‘I Got Rhythm’ (Kelly teaching French kids how to dance like aeroplanes and ‘chu-chu trains’), an instrumental in It’s Always Fair Weather (three soldiers crashing rhythmically around the streets with enormous trash-can lids on their shoes). It was an endless party, a crazy magic show ...”

“... in a ‘History of Civilisation’ series, in which it joins such works as Charles Burney and David Marshall Lang’s The People of the Hills: Ancient Ararat and Caucasus (1971) and George Lichtheim’s Europe in the 20th Century (1972). Indeed, the back of Lichtheim’s book announced Lewis’s work as forthcoming, though it then bore the title The ...”

“... T.F. Henderson, dismissed this theory on the grounds that, unlike Bothwell, Darnley could not read French, but we can no longer be so sure of that. In 1965, a Newcastle doctor, M.H. Armstrong Davison, advanced the ‘other woman thesis’ – that some of the letters were written by an unknown spurned lover of Bothwell’s – which has influenced a number of ...”

“... race, as if in fee, by the Almighty?’ Our ancestors, he continues, conquered Normandy, beat the French of Maine, Anjou, Aquitaine, conquered Britain and Apulia and Calabria and Sicily, and put to flight the emperors of both East and West on the same day. What have we to fear from King David and ‘his half-naked ...”